Cinema goers beware, Zack Snyder wants to be taken seriously. The director has just signed on to helm The Last Photograph, a film he was originally only producing and co-writing. The film tells the story of a journalist who teams with a special ops agent in order to find the family members of a group of Americans who are attacked in war torn Afghanistan. Sean Penn and Christian Bale are attached to star as the special ops agent and the journalist.
This smells like high brow Oscar bait rather than the hollow, flashy, stylised films that Snyder puts out and if one had a cynical head on, it is a cry out to critics for him to be taken seriously. After all, to his name he has two severely average comic book adaptations, a whimsical and bizarre owl film and a horrid fetish fantasy. The only thing worth watching was his Dawn of the Dead remake which stripped away all of the politics from George A. Romero‘s original but did give us a leaner and more technically competent thrill ride.
With The Last Photograph, Snyder cannot ignore the politics, neither can he treat it in a ham fisted way. With the conflict still on going, the politics behind the piece whether it be anti-war or pro-military or whatever, must be done with subtlety, as no one likes being preached at. However, I think subtlety is an attribute that Snyder is lacking in and on this film, he’ll have to work hard to refine it.
Of course, he isn’t the first director attached. Previously, Sergei Bodrov was interested and then director of the original The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Niels Arden Oplev was hired. There is no word on why he is out but one of the likely reasons is slow development, its been around since 2007.
We won’t see this for a while as Snyder has Man of Steel coming up and he plans to shoot that first, meaning we may not get The Last Photograph till early 2014 at the very earliest. Hopefully it will be worth the wait.
Source: Twitch Film